1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to method of manufacturing a semiconductor device, apparatus of manufacturing a semiconductor device and semiconductor device, and in particular to method of manufacturing a semiconductor device and apparatus of manufacturing semiconductor device which are suitable to form a fine pattern accurately, and semiconductor device made by the method or apparatus.
2. Background Art
When a fine pattern of a semiconductor device is formed by dry etching, a reactive ion etching (RIE) method which is excellent in dimensional controllability is frequently used. In the reactive ion etching (RIE) method, an etching gas is decomposed and activated by plasma to generate ions and neutral active species, and a fine pattern is formed on the surface of a semiconductor wafer (hereafter “wafer”) by the action of them. Volatile reaction products generated when forming the pattern are exhausted out of a chamber by an exhauster.
However, in some cases, part of the reaction products are deposited on an inner wall, electrodes, a dielectric window, etc. in the chamber without being exhausted. The deposited reaction products have a large influence on etching characteristics such as an etching rate, which becomes a cause of reducing the accuracy of line width dimensions of the pattern and the uniformity in the wafer surface of the line width dimensions. Such reduction leads to reduction in reliability of the semiconductor device as a product.
For this reason, cleaning technologies for removing deposited reaction products (see Japanese Unexamined Patent Publication No. 5-129246, for example), and technologies for changing deposited reaction products to a strong film to reduce the influence (see Japanese Patent No. 3712898, for example), etc. are proposed.